- [first lines]
- Narrator: In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.
- Soldier I: [Searching the body of a looter] Bag of crisps.
- Soldier II: What flavour are they?
- Soldier I: [Reads packet] Prawn Cocktail
- Soldier II: They fucking would be - I hate them.
- Peace Speaker: This time, they are playing with at best the destruction of life as we know it, and at worst total annihilation. You cannot win a nuclear war!
- [amid cheers]
- Peace Speaker: Now just suppose the Russians win this war... What exactly would they be winning? What would they have conquered? Well, I'll tell you: all major centres of population and industry would have been destroyed...
- Heckler #1: Industry? What industry? We ain't got no industry in Sheffield!
- Peace Speaker: [trying to make herself heard amongst the jeers] Yes, and if the money hadn't - if the money hadn't - if the money hadn't been spent on nuclear weapons, you would have built up industry.
- Heckler #2: Get back to bloody Russia! Where you belong!
- Heckler #3: Where's your red flag?
- Peace Speaker: We would have put money into welfare, we would have found alternative sources of energy. Industry...
- [pauses for applause]
- Peace Speaker: Industry will have been destroyed. Oil refineries will have been destroyed, all our water will have been polluted, the soil will have been irradiated. Farmstock will be dead, diseased or dying. The Russians would have conquered a corpse of a country.
- Mrs. Beckett: Ruth... Ruth, love... come on love, you'll have to eat something. But you'll have to, love, it's not just you now, you know, the baby needs some food as well.
- Ruth Beckett: [crying] I can't care about this baby anymore, I wish it was dead.
- Mrs. Beckett: Oh Ruth! Don't say things like that.
- Ruth Beckett: There's no point! There's no point with Jimmy dead.
- Mrs. Beckett: But you don't know he's dead, love...
- Ruth Beckett: He is! He is! I KNOW he is!
- Mrs. Beckett: You can't be certain.
- Ruth Beckett: We're breathing in all this radiation all the time - my baby!
- [sobs]
- Ruth Beckett: It'll be ugly and deformed.
- Public Information Film Announcer: If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address, and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets. If, however, you've had a body in the house for more than five days *and* if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial.
- Michael Kemp: Jimmy's getting married!
- Alison Kemp: Are you? Well it's a bit sudden! You're not even engaged!
- Jimmy Kemp: How do you know? Anyway, it's nowt to do wi' you, so keep your nose out.
- Alison Kemp: Are you getting married in a church or in a registry office?
- Michael Kemp: Alison, what's an abortion?
- Mrs. Kemp: Michael! I've told you once...
- Alison Kemp: Oh! So *that's* it!
- Narrator: It is 8:30 a.m. 3:30 in the morning in Washington. Over the past few days, neither the President nor his senior staff will have had more than a few hours rest. This is when they may be asleep. This is when Western response will be slowest.
- Public Information Film Announcer: If you leave your home, your local authority may take it over for homeless families. And, if you move, the authorities in the new place will not help you with food, accommodation, or other essentials. You are better off in your own home. Stay there.
- Air Raid Warning Center: [alarm blaring on loudspeaker] Attack Warning! Red! Attack Warning! Red!
- Food Officer: Attack warning! Is it for real?
- Accomodation Officer: Attack warning's for bloody real!
- Clive Sutton: Right, get to your stations!
- Narrator: [after showing graphic hospital casualties] By this time, without drugs, water or bandages, without electricity or medical support facilities. There is virtually no way a doctor can execute his skill as a source of help or comfort, he is little better equipped than the nearest survivor.
- Prisoner: Buggered if I'm gonna be shot by a traffic warden!
- Narrator: [during a showcase of a nuclear winter] Hanging in the atmosphere, the clouds of debris shut out the sun's heat and light. Across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere it starts to get dark, it starts to get cold. In the centers of large land masses like America or Russia, the temperature drop may be severe, as much as 25 degrees centigrade. Even in Britain, within days of the attack it could fall to freezing or below for long, dark periods.
- [as Jimmy & Bob are arguing with several men about selling wood, the air-raid siren begins to sound - a low, steady wail that continues to get louder]
- Jimmy Kemp: Come on quick! Get DOWN!
- [dives under the truck with Bob]
- Jimmy Kemp: [Panic begins to break out in the square as people desperately try to find cover before the warheads hit]
- Jane: [to her mother, who is in bed, prematurely aged and blinded by cataracts] Ruth? Ruth! Work. Work. Work Up!
- [Ruth dies. Jane shakes her one last time, then scavenges a scarf and a hairbrush from under Ruth's pillow before withdrawing, showing no visible signs of grief]
- Public Information Film Announcer: The time has now come to make everything ready for you and your family in case an air attack happens. This does not mean that war is about to come, but there is a risk of it, and we must all be prepared.
- Ruth Beckett: [after telling her worried boyfriend that she's pregnant] It's not the end of the world, is it?
- Text: [opening narration, in the 1985 TBS premiere] Threads is a story about nuclear war.
- ["Threads" is underlined in red]
- Text: It relates events through the experiences of two families: the working class Kemps and the middle class Becketts. The Beckett's unmarried daughter, Ruth, is pregnant. The father is young Jimmy Kemp, a fact linking the destinies of two families. Through their eyes Britain is seen slowly awakening to the possibility and consequences of nuclear war. The story spans a period of one month before to 13 years after a nuclear attack. It is set in the near future... in the city of Sheffield, England.
- Narrator: [during a montage of people descending upon a hospital in Buxton] The entire peacetime resources of the British Health Service, even if they survived, would be unable to cope with the effects of even the single bomb that's hit Sheffield.
- Narrator: [after showing graphic hospital casualties] By this time, without drugs, water or bandages, without electricity or medical support facilities. There is no way a doctor can virtually execute his skill as a source of help or comfort, he is little better equipped than the nearest survivor.
- US President: The United States government has been forced, reluctantly, to take action to safeguard what it believes are legitimate Western interests in the Middle East...
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